Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (97 page)

Jones never gave up wanting to become an American admiral, but no American naval officer was promoted to that rank until the American
Civil War. He returned to Paris, and in December 1787, Thomas Jefferson, who had succeeded Franklin as American minister to France, told him that the Russian minister in Paris wished to know whether Jones would be interested in a high command in the Russian navy: command of the Black Sea Fleet with an admiral’s rank. Jones grasped the offer: if not an American admiral, perhaps a Russian admiral.

The new admiral arrived in St. Petersburg on May 4, and Catherine wrote to Grimm, “
Paul Jones has just arrived here; he has entered my service. I saw him today. I think he will suit our purpose admirably.” Jones’s view of her was equally optimistic: “
I was entirely captivated and put myself into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage. I demanded but one favor: that she would never condemn me without hearing me.” He traveled south and met Potemkin at Ekaterinoslav. Assuming that he was to take supreme command of the Black Sea Fleet, he passed through Kherson to the Liman estuary. There, to his dismay, he found himself in the company of three other rear admirals, including the prince of Nassau-Siegen, none of whom was willing to concede superiority in rank to Jones. Potemkin refused to intervene.

The theater of operations was the Liman estuary, thirty miles long, nowhere more than eight miles wide, and nowhere more than eighteen feet deep; large warships, whose movements were subject to the direction of the wind, found it difficult to maneuver without running aground. Jones was given command of the squadron of larger ships that included one ship of the line and eight frigates. If his enemy, the Turks, decided to enter these narrow, congested waters in force, they could bring as many as eighteen ships of the line and forty frigates, along with numerous oar-propelled galleys, rowed by slaves chained to their seats. The Russians also had a flotilla of twenty-five oar-propelled, shallow-draft galleys, but their commander, the prince of Nassau-Siegen, was independent of Jones, and took orders only from Potemkin. A battle with the Turks on June 5 was inconclusive, and afterward Russian commanders argued about tactics and credit for their success in forcing the Turks to withdraw. Potemkin sided with Nassau-Siegen. “
It is to you alone that I attribute victory,” he wrote. To Catherine, Potemkin wrote, “Nassau was the real hero and to him belongs the victory.” The battle resumed ten days later, and Jones found himself in difficulty—not with the Turks, but with the Russians. He did not speak Russian, and there was no agreed-on method of signaling between his ships; the admiral
had to have himself rowed in a small boat so that he could shout instructions to his captains; even these had to be given through an interpreter. Nevertheless, he won; the Turkish flagship ran aground and was destroyed. Nassau-Siegen took the credit. “
Our victory is complete,” he wrote to his wife. “My flotilla did it. Oh what a poor man is Paul Jones! I am master of the Liman. Poor Paul Jones! No place for him on this great day!” Throughout his life, Jones had displayed an intense desire to have his merit recognized. He wrote to Potemkin, “
I hope to be subjected to no more humiliation and to find myself soon in the situation that was promised me when I was invited to enter Her Imperial Majesty’s Navy.” Instead, Potemkin relieved Jones of command, explaining to the empress that “
nobody wished to serve under him.” By the end of October, Jones was back in St. Petersburg, where he was received by Catherine and told to wait for an assignment with the Baltic Fleet.

He waited through the winter, passing time with his friend the French ambassador, Philippe de Ségur. During the first week of April 1789, the capital was startled by a report that Rear Admiral Jones had attempted to rape a ten-year-old girl, the daughter of a German immigrant woman who had a dairy business. The police had been told that the girl was peddling butter when Jones’s manservant told her that his master wanted to purchase some and led her to Jones’s apartment. There, the girl said, she found her customer, whom she had never seen before, dressed in a white uniform wearing a gold star and a red ribbon. He bought some butter, locked the door, knocked her down, dragged her into his bedroom, and assaulted her. She ran home and told her mother, who went to the police. Ségur defended his friend, both at the time and later in his memoirs. He said that the young girl had called on Jones to ask whether he had any linen to mend. He said no. “
She then indulged in some indecent gestures,” Ségur quotes Jones as saying. “I advised her not to enter on so vile a career, gave her some money and dismissed her.” As soon as she left his front door, the girl ripped her dress, screamed “Rape!” and threw herself into the arms of her mother, who, conveniently, was standing nearby.

Two weeks later, Jones wrote to Potemkin that he had learned that the mother had admitted that a gentleman with decorations had given her money to tell a damaging story about the American. She confessed that her daughter was twelve, not ten, and had been seduced by Jones’s manservant three months before she visited the admiral. Further, Jones said that immediately after the alleged rape, rather than rushing home
to her mother, the girl had continued peddling butter. “
The charge against me is an unworthy imposture,” Jones continued to Potemkin. “Shall it be said that in Russia, a wretched woman who abandoned her husband, stole away her daughter, lives in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched, lecherous life, has found credit enough on a simple complaint unsupported by any proof to affect the honor of a general officer of reputation who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire? I love women, I confess, and the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force is horrible to me. I cannot even contemplate gratifying my passions without their consent, and I give you my word as a soldier and an honest man, that if the girl in question has not passed through hands other than mine, she is still a virgin.”

There was, however, a third version. Before talking to Ségur or writing Potemkin, Jones had informed the chief of police: “
The accusation against me is false. It was invented by the mother of a depraved girl who came to my house several times and with whom I have often
badine
,
^*
always giving her money, but whose virginity I have positively not taken. I thought her to be several years older than Your Excellency says she is and each time she came to my house she lent herself very willingly to do all that a man would want of her. The last time passed off like the rest and she went out appearing content and calm, and having been in no way abused. If one has checked on her being deflowered, I declare that I am not the author of it, and I shall easily prove the falseness of this assertion.” This letter was supported by affidavits from three witnesses who swore that they saw the girl leave Jones’s apartment quietly without blood, bruises, torn clothing, or tears.

In any case, if not a crime, this encounter between a restless, lonely, middle-aged man and an underage girl was tawdry. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but Jones was ostracized by St. Petersburg society. Ségur believed that Jones had been duped and that the prince of Nassau-Siegen was responsible. “Paul Jones is no more guilty than I,” the ambassador declared, “and a man of his rank has never suffered
such humiliation through the accusation of a woman whose husband certifies that she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.” Criminal charges against Jones were dropped, but the offer of a command in the Baltic Fleet also evaporated. (This command went to Nassau-Siegen, who promptly lost a naval battle to Sweden.) In lieu of outright dismissal, Catherine granted Jones a two-year leave of absence. On June 26, she gave him her hand to kiss in a public farewell and nodded a cool “Bon voyage.”

What remained of his life was brief and anticlimactic. Never again did he command a ship, much less a fleet. Still in his early forties, he lived alone in Paris during the first years of the French Revolution; neither Gouverneur Morris, the American minister, nor Lafayette found time to see him. He died on July 18, 1792, two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, of nephritis and bronchial pneumonia. After his death, Gouverneur Morris refused to allot public funds for a funeral or to save Jones from a pauper’s grave. Instead, the French National Assembly, which remembered him as a hero, paid for what little was done.

A century passed. In 1899, the American ambassador to France, Horace Porter, used his own money to search for Jones’s body. It was found in a lead coffin, under a pavement, in an obscure cemetery outside Paris. When Theodore Roosevelt was president and creating a great American navy became one of his passions, he sent four American armored cruisers to Cherbourg to carry Jones back across the Atlantic to his adopted country. In 1913, 121 years after his death, the body of John Paul Jones, proclaimed to be the father of the United States Navy, was placed in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt of the U.S. Naval Academy chapel. Since then, every midshipman has been taught Jones’s words, whether they were exactly his words or not: “I have not yet begun to fight.”

By the summer of 1791, the Russian army had forced the Turks to the peace table. In the treaty concluded at Jassy in Moldavia in December 1791, Catherine’s greatest goals were not achieved: the Turks kept Constantinople, and the crescent remained atop the Haigia Sophia; there was no Greek empire for Grand Duke Constantine. Still, Catherine gained much. The Turks formally ceded the Crimea, the mouth of the Dnieper with Ochakov, and the territory between the Bug and the Dniester rivers, making the Dniester Russia’s western frontier. Formal acquisition by treaty of the naval base at Sebastopol and Turkish acceptance
of the fleet based there provided Russia with a permanent naval presence on the Black Sea. The subsequent development of the commercial port of Odessa provided an outlet for the export of large quantities of Russian wheat.

The second Turkish war had been Potemkin’s war; he had borne responsibility for strategy, command, and logistics. Catherine had sustained him. She was the more stable, avoiding his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism, his doubts, fears, and occasional despair. Neither could have achieved victory without the other. When military operations were over, Potemkin turned the negotiations at Jassy over to others and headed back to St. Petersburg, where Catherine was preparing a conqueror’s welcome. Even as he traveled north, however, Potemkin was worried. For the first time in seventeen years, Catherine had acquired a new favorite of whom he vehemently disapproved: a handsome young man named Platon Zubov. Poorly educated, he was vain and greedy for wealth, estates, honors, and titles, not only for himself but also for his father and his three brothers; all soon became counts. The most prominent men of the court and the empire began lining up to humble themselves at his morning levee. When the doors to his reception room opened, they were likely to reveal Zubov stretched out in a lounge chair before his mirror, having his hair dressed and powdered. He could be wearing a silk colored frock coat sewn with jewels, white satin trousers, and green ankle-length boots. Conspicuously ignoring the ministers, generals, courtiers, foreigners, and petitioners who stood motionless and silent before him, he paid attention only to his pet monkey. When, with a gesture, the master cued the creature’s performance, it leaped across the furniture, hung from the chandeliers, and finally jumped onto a visitor’s shoulder to pull off his wig or muss his hair. When Zubov laughed, everyone laughed.

Potemkin knew that he and Zubov would now be competing for the empress’s confidence. So far, he had remained foremost; Catherine consulted him on everything; she told him that if war were to break out in Poland, he was to take supreme command of the Russian army. Nevertheless, he was uneasy.
“Zub”
means “tooth” in Russian. As his carriage rolled north to the capital, Potemkin repeatedly reminded himself, “
I must pull out the tooth.”

Arriving in St. Petersburg on February 28, 1791, Potemkin quickly demonstrated that his character had not changed. When Kyril Razumovsky called to tell him that he was giving a ball in Potemkin’s honor, Potemkin met his visitor wearing a tattered dressing gown and nothing
underneath. Razumovsky good-naturedly retaliated a few days later by publicly receiving the prince wearing a nightgown with a nightcap on his head. Potemkin laughed and embraced his host.

He turned to the problem of Zubov, which, he believed, had to be solved as much to shield Catherine as for his own reasons. He saw that he could no longer use his political power as he had done with Yermolov; if this young man were to be displaced, it must be done more subtly. The best approach, he concluded, would be to re-create the aura of their old romance. Surprisingly, he partially succeeded. In a letter to Grimm on May 21, Catherine spoke of Potemkin with the same enthusiasm that she had years before.

Potemkin’s success was incomplete, however. It was obvious that Catherine wanted her relationship with Zubov to continue. The competition between the two men became a standoff: Potemkin openly displayed his contempt for Zubov, who, in return, smiled and bided his time. Meanwhile, when Potemkin’s bills came due, Catherine paid them, instructing the treasury that it was to treat Prince Potemkin’s expenses as if they were her own.

Potemkin tried to distract himself by giving and attending receptions, dinners, and balls. The evening that surpassed anything ever seen in Russia occurred on April 28, 1791, at Potemkin’s Tauride Palace. Three thousand guests had been invited; all were present when the empress arrived. The prince was at the door, wearing a scarlet tailcoat with solid gold buttons, each button encasing a large solitaire diamond. Once the empress was seated, twenty-four couples, including Catherine’s two grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, entered to dance a quadrille. Afterward, the host led his guest through the rooms of the palace. In one, poets were reciting verse; in another, a choir was singing; in still another, a French comedy was being performed.